Loyalty programs have been relatively successful; however, numerous loyalty programs exist, so businesses have a difficult time differentiating their loyalty programs from other loyalty programs on the market. Moreover, many consumers often travel for work related reasons, so they may not desire to use their loyalty points to travel to distant cities or distant countries. Rather, many consumers enjoy the benefits of their “hometown” region, including local restaurants, local theaters, local sporting activities and other events. At the same time, marketers have begun to understand that many consumers develop a strong pride, emotional affinity and loyalty to the geographic region where they live. As such, a long-felt need exists for a loyalty program which rewards consumers for purchases in certain local geographic areas and which enables consumers to utilize their loyalty points in a similar local geographic area.
Loyalty point systems also typically include individual consumer loyalty point accounts which record the balance of loyalty points earned by the individual consumer, wherein the loyalty points may be earned within a particular geographic area. The consumer may be part of a family or organization and the consumer may desire to share or transfer the consumer's loyalty points in a geographic area to other members of the consumer's family or organization. Moreover, a consumer may immediately need additional loyalty points in a geographic area in his or her own loyalty account in order to have a sufficient number of loyalty points for a certain award. The consumer may also know of a friend or relative who has excess loyalty points in a geographic area that they would gladly transfer to the consumer in need of additional loyalty points. However, because many loyalty point accounts are associated with a single consumer, existing loyalty systems do not allow a consumer to efficiently transfer loyalty points to another consumer loyalty point account. Moreover, while some loyalty accounts may allow the consumer to use the loyalty points in a geographic area to purchase gifts for others, the loyalty points are not sufficiently transferable to another consumer such that the other consumer can purchase the same gift or aggregate points for a different gift.
Moreover, to promote loyalty to a particular company, many of the above-described loyalty programs are sponsored by and operated by a company such that the consumers are typically required to earn and burn the loyalty points through the same company. As such, a particular sponsoring company may market its own loyalty points under a particular trademark (e.g., Membership Rewards sponsored by American Express, DeltaMiles sponsored by Delta Airlines, Hilton Rewards sponsored by Hilton Hotels, ePloids sponsored by Frito-Lay and FlightFund sponsored by America West Airlines) and maintain loyalty point accounts for each consumer, wherein the accounts include only loyalty points associated with the sponsoring company. Accordingly, the consumers in the sponsoring company loyalty program typically earn loyalty points from the sponsoring company, then the consumers spend the sponsored loyalty points on reward items offered by the sponsoring company.
However, it is often difficult for an individual sponsoring company to offer a sufficiently wide range of reward items in certain geographic areas to satisfy the varied interests of its consumers. Moreover, many of the consumers may only engage in a limited amount of business in a certain geographic area with the particular sponsoring company and/or may only earn a limited amount of sponsored loyalty points from the sponsoring company within the geographic area. As such, a consumer's loyalty point account with the sponsoring company may include a minimal amount of loyalty points in a geographic area and the minimal point balance may be insufficient to obtain any desired reward item in the geographic area. Additionally, even if a consumer obtains a sufficient point balance in a geographic area with a particular sponsoring company, the consumer may not be interested in redeeming the points for any of the limited reward items in the geographic area offered by the company, the consumer may forget or ignore the existence of the point balance and/or the consumer may not desire to spend the time reviewing the reward items or completing the redemption information. In these exemplary situations, the loyalty point account may only be rarely used or may remain inactive.
The sponsoring company often maintains hundreds or thousands of loyalty point accounts for current and past consumers; however, possible public relations, marketing and legal implications exist with a sponsoring company simply canceling certain loyalty point accounts or setting expiration dates on points. As such, the sponsoring company usually continues to maintain the rarely used or inactive loyalty point accounts. However, accounting and legal guidelines typically require a sponsoring company to include all of the loyalty point balances, including balances from the rarely used loyalty point accounts, as liabilities on its accounting statements. As such, a need exists for a system and method for reducing or eliminating certain loyalty account balances and providing certain consumers with new ways to aggregate and redeem geographic-based loyalty point balances.